The present invention relates to techniques for creating and processing a document with use of a word processor or personal computer for its display and print, and more particularly, to a technique for processing a document which uses information that frequently appears in the document as shared information.
For the purpose of efficiently sharing and re-using document information, a recent active move is to use such a document language as a standard generalized markup language (SGML) or XML to obtain and utilize a document.
Since a document prepared in a structured document language can be prepared by dividing the document into its structural elements as document parts for editing and describing links to the respective parts, it is easy for the document parts to be shared with another document or to re-use another document on every part basis.
When it is desired to display or print the link-described document having such links to the parts described therein, the document is converted to a document having the contents of the document parts of the other link-destination document embedded in the locations, and then displayed or printed.
To this end, a conventional editor for editing such a document provides a means for designating a document part as a part of the other document to describe a link to the document in the editing document.
When such a document editor is used, it can facilitate such an operation that a figure, which is prepared in a functional specification as another document, can be re-used, for example, during editing of a design document.
Further, when a re-used part is edited, its edited result can be reflected throughout the entire document having the shared part. As a result, consistency management can be facilitated.
JP-A-8-44718 (Fuji Xerox Ltd.) discloses a method that, when a figure or table is shared among a plurality of documents, its shared relationships are managed so that, when the shared constituent element is edited in the sharing original document, its edited result can be correctly reflected even on the other shared documents (figure or table), thus maintaining consistency of the shared information.
In addition, even in a document system for performing version management, the above method can keep the shared information consistency. Thus, when it is desired to reduce the number of versions, it becomes possible to judge whether a constituent element or elements are shared among a plurality of versions, thus realizing such a management as to prevent an inconsistency in the shared relationships.
Constituent elements of documents which are effective when the elements are shared include, in addition to such a figure or table as mentioned in connection with JP-A-8-44718, a character string which is used in many documents.
For example, at the time of preparing a document, it is very common for a document writer to consistently use the same character string in a plurality of documents or within one document. More specifically, when it is desired to prepare specifications in a product development project, it is required to use common module names, unique abbreviations and coinages which constitute the project.
In reality, however, it is often required to modify such words to more appropriate ones as the project goes on. In such a case, it has been conventionally inevitably required to manually modify all the documents at the modified time point.
When such documents are written as shared by a plurality of writers, it becomes further difficult to obtain a word consistency throughout the documents, and thus inevitably an enormous amount of labor of final proof-reading of the documents is required.
Further, persons"" names or departments frequently appear in a plurality of documents regardless of the document types. For this reason, when a department is modified, it is also required to modify many associated documents.
Furthermore, when a document is prepared, it is often not prepared newly but as a copy of a template, which is edited as to the contents thereof. Thus, even when it is required to change an old department to a new one, some of the old departments are often erroneously left as they are without being modified.
When such modification information is treated as a document part to be shared among a plurality of documents, the information consistency can be automatically realized. And even when the information is corrected, its corrected contents can be reflected on all the documents. As a result, highly efficient document preparation and editing can be carried out.
However, when such shared information is edited in the conventional system for its sharing, this involves problems which follow.
FIG. 5 shows an example of a plurality of documents which contain a document part or parts as a part or parts of the other documents with use of a known document editor.
For example, when a figure 504 (which is called sharing originator information), which forms one of the constituent elements of a document A 501, is designated to describe its link to a document B 502, this causes appearance of contents of the document part (figure 504) of a link destination in the document B 502 (as a figure 505)
Next, when it is desired to share the same figure 504 even in a document D 506, a document containing the sharing originator information, that is, the document A 501, is searched to perform similar share designation to the above.
When information is shared in such a large unit as the figure and the number of sharing units as document parts is not so large as in the example of FIG. 5, the conventional system may be applicable. However, when such document parts such as terms, names and belonging departments appear frequently, this share designating operation becomes highly troublesome.
That is, when many pieces of information are to be shared in such a small unit, it becomes difficult in the sharing designation to search the other documents containing the sharing originator information. Meanwhile, an identical type of shared information is often simultaneously modified, as when many terms are modified or a plurality of persons change their belonging departments at a time in a project. In this case, the prior art system is required to search and modify the other documents containing the sharing originator information, which makes the modifying operation complex.
Meanwhile, information on a person""s name or belonging department is associated with each other, and thus when a person is determined, his name, belonging department, and telephone number extension ought to be automatically determined. However, when the prior art system is employed to edit the document to share information associated with the person, his name, belonging department and telephone number extension are shared respectively independently. For this reason, modification of, e.g., name cannot follow automatic modification of the belonging department and telephone number extension associated with the name, but require individual editing of the shared information. As a result, its editing operation becomes highly complicated.
For the purpose of controlling such related information, a database management system is employed. This system however has a problem that, since schema design for determining a data structure is difficult in a database, the system cannot be easily applied to document preparation. Another problem is that, once the data structure is determined, it becomes hard to modify the structure.
Further, when the shared information a modified, there are considered two cases: one of which it is desired to reflect the modification on all documents having the shared part, and where it is desired not to reflect the modification on past documents already edited.
For example, in the case of a term used in a project, it is necessary to reflect the term modification even on the documents already edited, but with respect to a reporter""s name and belonging department described in a report submitted in the past, the information at the time of the submission must remain.
The prior art system has a problem that the management of consistency between the above two cases cannot be realized since the part modification is inevitably reflected on all the documents having the shared part.
The prior art system also has another problem that, when it is desired to modify shared information and to reflect the information modification on documents having the shared information, the correlation between the document and shared information link varies depending on the modification contents of the shared information, resulting in a wrong reflection thereof.
In view of such problems in the prior art, it is therefore an object of the present invention to facilitate unification of notation or representation of information such as term, name and belonging department, and also to facilitate automatic reflection of modification on all documents. A specific object of the present invention is to provide a document processing method and system, and a recording medium having a document processing program, which enables easy description of a link of shared information in a document.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a document processing technique which, unlike such a complex method as in a database management system, can facilitate data structure modification in a simple manner, and thus which can manage related information and efficiently edit documents with use of the related information.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a document processing technique, for shared information having been modified, which can manage the consistency between two cases where it is desired to reflect a modification result on all documents having its shared information part and where it is desired not to reflect the modification on past documents already edited.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a document processing technique which can avoid variations in correlations between documents and a shared information link, even when the shared information is modified and it is desired to reflect its modification result on documents having the shared information.
To achieve the above objects, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer-implemented method for processing a document in a document processing system having a processor, a memory and a terminal device, comprising the steps of: generating as a set of shared information a shared information block frequently appearing in a plurality of documents; storing the generated shared information in a memory; listing up the stored shared information for each of plurality of information types; editing the document to describe a link to the shared information selected from the displayed list of the edited shared information in the documents; storing the link-described documents in the memory; and selecting and reading out from the memory the generated shared information and described document, embedding the shared information in the link-described document according to the links described therein and the generated shared information, and outputting information indicative of a document having the shared information embedded therein. The output step may include a step of displaying or printing the output information.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, the information block generating step generates as the shared information a term such as abbreviation or coinage and a term combination of a term such as a person""s name or belonging department and edits the shared information into structured documents depending on the types of the information.
In accordance with a further aspect of the present invention, the document processing method further comprises a version management step of managing a change history of the shared information and documents, and the version management step stores in the memories the generated shared information and the generated document attached by information indicative of a new version, generates version information with time base information for each of the shared information and document and stores the version information in the memory, and the output step includes a step of displaying or printing the document having the shared information embedded therein on the basis of the output information. The display or print step, when it is desired to display or print the document in the display or print step, selects the shared information of the latest version created prior to a date and hour of creation of the document on the basis of the version information and embeds the selected shared information in the document.
In accordance with yet another object of the present invention, the document processing method further comprises a step of managing a change history of the shared information and document, the version management step stores in the memory the generated shared information and generated document attached by information as a new version, creates version information for each of the shared information and document and stores the version information in the memory. The document processing method further comprises a step of generating consistency-processed shared information already subjected to a consistency processing operation. The consistency processing step, when the shared information is generated and a character string or structure has been already changed after editing of the document, maintains contents of the character string in its state before the change and returns the structure change to its state at the time of creating the document, generates shared information satisfying its consistency, and, when it is desired to display and/or print the document in the output step, embeds the consistency-satisfied shared information in the document.
In accordance with a still further aspect of the present invention, the document processing method further comprises a step of managing a change history of the shared information and document, the version management step stores in the memory the generated shared information and generated document attached by information indicative of a new version, creates version information for each of the shared information and document and stores the version information in the memory. The document processing method further comprises a step of generating consistency-processed shared information already subjected to a consistency processing operation. The consistency processing step, when the shared information has been already edited after editing of the document, acquires the latest shared information and the shared information at the time of creating the document to be displayed or printed, compares both of the acquired shared information to extract a construction changed location, and, when the structure change is extracted, returns the changed structure to its state at the time of creating the document in the latest shared information to generate consistency-satisfied shared information, and, when it is desired to display or print the document in the output step, embeds the consistency-satisfied shared information in the document.
In accordance with an additional aspect of the present invention, in the document processing method, when the structure is changed in the consistency processing step, the structure is deleted from the latest shared information when contents of the change correspond to insertion of the structure in the shared information at the document creation time, or, when the contents of the change correspond to deletion of the structure from the shared information at the document creation time, the structure is inserted in the latest shared information, or, when the contents of the change correspond to exchange of the structure of the shared information at the document creation time, the structure after the exchange is deleted from the latest shared information and the structure before the exchange is inserted to thereby generate the consistency-satisfied shared information.
Other objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent when reading the following detailed description of the embodiments of the invention taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.